Friedrich Nietzsche, The Greek Music Drama

Translators Introduction
In 1870 Friedrich Nietzsche, fresh from his appointment in April 1869 as
Extraordinary Professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, gave two
public lectures in the Basel Museum. The first, delivered on 18 January 1870, was
entitled The Greek Music Drama; the second, a fortnight later, was entitled
Socrates and Tragedy.1 Nietzsches ambition in these lectures was twofold: he was
sketching out ideas that were to find definitive expression in The Birth of Tragedy,
published two years later, and seeking to intervene in the cultural politics of the age
by implicitly lending support to Wagner, an unspoken but unmistakeable presence in
the lectures. In a letter from this period, Nietzsche indicated his awareness that his
approach to tragedy was a pluridisciplinary one: Scholarship, art, and philosophy are
growing together in me to such an extent, he told his friend, Erwin Rohde, that if
nothing else I shall give birth to centaurs.2 An earlier part of this letter reflects
Nietzsches passionate commitment to ancient Greece and his almost existential sense
of loyalty to Greek culture as well as his elevated notion of academic life:
Every day I get to like the Hellenic world more and more. There is no
better way of approaching close to it than that of indefatigably cultivating
ones own little self. The degree of culture I have attained consists in a
most mortifying admission of my own ignorance. The life of a philologist
striving in every direction of criticism and yet a thousand miles away from
Greek antiquity becomes every day more impossible to me. I even doubt
if I shall ever succeed in becoming a proper philologist. If I cannot
succeed incidentally, as it were, I shall never succeed.3

For the original text of these two lectures, see KSA 1, 513-549 and KGW III.2, 3-22. This
translation is based on Das griechische Musikdrama, in Gesammelte Werke [MusarionAusgabe], ed. Richard Oehler, Max Oehler, and Friedrich Chr. Wurzbach, 33 vols (Munich:
Musarion, 1920-1929), vol. 3, Die Geburt der Tragdie; Aus dem Gedankenkreis der Geburt
der Tragdie, 1869-1871, pp. 169-87 (for ease of reference pagination has been retained in
square brackets); also in Werke [Grooktavausgabe], ed. F. Koegel, 19 vols (Leipzig:
Neumann, 1895-1897; 2 edn, 1899-1913), vol. 9, pp. 33-52.
1

Nietzsche to Erwin Rohde of late January and 15 February 1870 (KSB 3, 95).
3

KSB 3, 94; Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy, trans. Anthony M.
Ludovici (London and Garden City, NY: Heinemann, 1921), pp. 62-63.

Arguably the most important aspect of his first lecture on the Greek music drama is
Nietzsches insistence on the relevance for modernity of the ancient conception of
tragedy; or rather on the possibility of its relevance being rediscovered. For his lecture
is, as Silk and Stern noted, a public lament over the inability of citizens of the
modern world to respond to life as whole beings, above all in the sphere of art,4 and
behind the argument about the Gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art lies a plea for a
richer, fuller mode of life, one in which, in contrast to the Cartesian tradition and to
the denigration of the body in Western philosophy in general, we undertake to
recuperate the total economy of the body and become more holistic beings.
During a visit to Tribschen with Rohde, Nietzsche in a room, it has been
suggested, in which a water-colour version of Genellis painting of Bacchus Among
the Muses was hanging 5 read out part of his lecture on the music drama.
Subsequently, on 19 June 1870 he sent a copy of his two lectures to Cosima Wagner
who, on 24 June 1870, responded with the following comments about The Greek
Music Drama:
How touched I am by the dedication of the two lectures you were kind enough to
send me. Accept my warmest thanks for having vouchsafed me this great
pleasure. I have now re-read the lecture on the music drama and can only repeat
that I regard it as an invaluable vestibule to your Socrates lecture. I could have
spared myself the most unnecessary agitation at the time of the first reading had I
known by what a warm pulsing description of the Greek art works it had been
preceded. Your broad-boughed tree is now rooted in the most glorious past, in
the home-land of beauty, and proudly rears its head into the most beautiful
dreams of the future. Many details which captivated and stimulated me even
during your reading are now indelibly stamped upon my mind. For instance,
your comprehension of creation and evolution, of the Fanget an! [Just
begin!] in art[6] as well as in nature, and particularly, your views on the high
consecration of the drama. Your thoroughly trenchant characterization of the
chorus as a separate organism an idea quite new to me seems to me to
furnish the only correct interpretation of the Greek drama. Moreover, the bold
and striking analogy you draw between the religious dance of the chorus and the
andante, and between the English tragedy (you mean, of course, the
Shakespearian) and the allegros of Beethoven, has again demonstrated to me
your deeply musical nature, and I think it is not improbable that this striking
4

M.S. Silk and J.P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), 191.
5

See Silk and Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, p. 214. For further discussion, see Siegfried
Mandel, Genelli and Wagner: Midwives to Nietzsches The Birth of Tragedy, NietzscheStudien, 19 (1990): 212-229.
6

See The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, Act 1, scene 3.

musical instinct, has given you the key to the innermost secrets of the Greek
tragedy, to suffering instead of action just as if a person had been led through
the Indian religion to the philosophy of Schopenhauer.7

Two years later, when he published The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had added a
preface in which he dedicated that work to Wagner, and his Birth reprises a number of
themes from The Greek Music Drama.8
Looking back in a note written in spring 1884, Nietzsche claimed I have been
the first to discover the tragic, and that the Greeks, thanks to their moralistic
superficiality, had misunderstood it.9 Yet The Music Drama anticipates precisely
the later Nietzsches definition of tragedy when, in Twilight of the Idols, he wrote:
The psychology of the orgy as an overflowing feeling of life and energy, within
which even pain acts as a stimulus, gave me the key to the concept of the tragic
feeling.10 Because it is affirmation of life even in its strangest and most difficult
problems; the will-to-life becoming joyful through the sacrifice of its highest types to
its own inexhaustibility that Nietzsche at once qualifies as Dionysian and uses as
the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet.11 In an age when, as Rdiger
Safranski has put it, we live simultaneously in two worlds, one Apollonian, the other
Dionysian exemplified by travelling in the tube or jogging through the park
(Apollo) whilst listening to music on an i-pod (Dionysos) 12 Nietzsches text,
presented as an exercise in philological aesthetics, already speaks to our condition in
the way that his great work of cultural history, The Birth of Tragedy, expanded and
developed.
What follows is a translation of Nietzsches first lecture, accompanied with
interpretative notes aimed at explaining references in his text and providing relevant
7

See Cosima Wagners letter to Nietzsche of 24 June 1870, in Elisabeth Frster-Nietzsche

(ed.), The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence, trans. Caroline V. Kerr (London: Duckworth,
1922), pp. 55-56 [translation modified].
8

For further discussion, see Dennis Sweet, The Birth of The Birth of Tragedy, Journal of the
History of Ideas, vol. 60, no. 2 (April 1999): 345-359.
9

See KSA 11, 25[95], 33 (cf. The Will to Power, 1029).

10

Twilight of the Idols, What I Owe to the Ancients (5); KSA 5, 160.
11

Twilight of the Idols, What I Owe to the Ancients (5); KSA 5, 160.

Rdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: Biographie seines Denkens (Munich and Vienna: Hanser,
2000), 97.
12

explanatory material. Inasmuch as this text is, for the first time, being presented in
English, it is a historic translation, and as such it seeks to make good the
comparative neglect of this essay in Nietzsche studies, at least in the English-speaking
world, where it seems to have been largely neglected. Yet the essay leads the reader to
the heart of Nietzsches move from philology to philosophy, anticipating the central
themes of Thus spoke Zarathustra.13

A note from the editor: The Agonist will only be publishing an excerpt of this
translation as a prelude to the forthcoming book version of the essay, which will be
the first text published by Contra Mundum Press, the offshoot of Hyperion: On the
Future of Aesthetics. Further news regarding the publication will be posted on the
Nietzsche Circle web site.

The Greek Music Drama

For their comments on an earlier draft of this translation, I should like to thank Rainer J.
Hanshe and Yunus Tuncel, while for advice on musicological aspects of Nietzsches
argument, I am grateful to Martin Dixon and Graham Whitaker.
13

Friedrich Nietzsche
In our contemporary drama we do not find only memories and echoes of the dramatic
arts of Greece: rather, its basic forms are rooted in Hellenic soil, from which they
grow naturally or to which they are more artificially related. Only their names have
become subject to numerous shifts and changes: just as medieval musicology retained
the Greek diatonic scales, along with their names, but what the Greeks, for instance,
called Locrian was known among the Church modes as Dorian.14 We encounter
14

Nietzsches identification of the Locrian mode with the Dorian mode glosses over the
distinction between mode and scale, and the differences between the medieval and modern
terminology. The main source for ancient Greek music theory is Aristoxenus of Tarentum, of
whose writings (from the third century BCE) on harmonics and on rhythm various incomplete
books survive, while later sources include (from the sixth century CE) Boethiuss De
institutione musica and (from the ninth century CE) Hucbalds De harmonica institutione and
the anonymous treatise Alia musica. For further discussion of the Dorian mode, see one of
Nietzsche sources (see below), August Wilhelm Ambross Geschichte der Musik, vol. 1, pp.
380-404; as well as Phillips Barry, Greek Music, The Musical Quarterly, 5 (1919): 578613, and the entries on Mode and Scale in The New Grove Dictionary of Music. Strictly
speaking, the Locrian mode corresponds to the Hyperdorian mode, but Nietzsches reference
to the Dorian mode is strategic, in that Greeks believed in a link between music and character
(Plato, Republic, 401 and 402; Laws, 659 c 659 e; Aristotle, Politics, 1340b). In the Laches,
Socratess eponymous interlocutor remarks that the true musician is attuned to a fairer
harmony than that of the lyre, or any pleasant instrument of music, for truly he has in his own
life a harmony of words and deeds arrangednot in the Ionian, or in the Phrygian mode, nor
yet in the Lydian, but in the true Hellenic mode, which is the Dorian, and no other (188 d),
and Socrates concurs that the Dorian mode [] is a harmony of words and deeds (193 e);
in the Republic, Socrates counsels avoidance of the Lydian, Mixolydian, and Ionian modes,
but implicitly recommends Dorian or Phrygian modes for soldiers (398 d 399 c; Plato, The
Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1963), pp. 132, 137, 643-44), while Aristotle in his Politics describes the
effect of the Dorian as being able to produce a moderate and settled temper (1340 b;
Aristotle, Basic Works, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 1312). In
Nietzsches own time, Gilbert in Oscar Wildes dialogue The Critic as Artist (1891) says of
the overture to Wagners Tannhuser: To-morrow, like the music of which Aristotle and
Plato tell us, the noble Dorian music of the Greek, it may perform the office of a physician,
and give us an anodyne against pain, and heal the spirit that is wounded, and bring the soul
into harmony with all right things, perhaps alluding here to Platos Republic: Rhythm and
harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them
and imparting grace (401 d; Collected Dialogues, p. 646). Wildes character concludes:
What is true of music is true about all the arts. Beauty has as many meanings as man has
moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses
nothing. When it shows itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world (Oscar Wilde,
Plays, Prose Writings, and Poems (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1930), pp.1-65 [p. 28]).
Elsewhere, in The Birth of Tragedy (2 and 4), Nietzsche uses the term Doric with reference
to one of the four major tribes of ancient Greece, singling out Doric art as immortalizing the
majestic and rejecting attitude of Apollo (KSA 1, 32), describing the music of Apollo as
Doric architectonic in tones (KSA 1, 33), and calling the Doric state a military
encampment of the Apollonian (KSA 1, 41). In 1888, Nietzsche returns to the problem of the
drama and the Doric, noting in a footnote in The Case of Wagner: The word drama is of

similar confusions in the field of dramatic terminology: what the Athenians called
tragedy is something which, if we had to find a term, we would call Grand
Opera; at least, this is what Voltaire did in a letter to Cardinal Quirini.15 By contrast,
a Greek would recognize in our tragedy almost nothing corresponding to his tragedy;
although he would certainly guess that the entire structure and fundamental character
of Shakespeares tragedy is borrowed from what he would call New Comedy.16 In fact,
it is from this source, after incredible stretches of [170] time, that the RomanicGermanic mystery- or morality-play, and finally Shakespearian tragedy, arises: in a
similar way that, in its external form, the genealogical relationship of Shakespeares
stage to that of the New Attic Comedy cannot be overlooked.17 Whilst we can
recognize here a development that progresses naturally across the millennia, modern
art has deliberately immunized itself against the real tragedy of antiquity, the works of
Aeschylus and Sophocles.18 What, today, we call opera, the distorted image of the
music drama of antiquity, has arisen through a direct mimicry of antiquity: without the
unconscious force of a natural drive, but formed in accordance with an abstract
theory, it has behaved like an artificially produced homunculus, as if it were the evil
imp of our modern musical development. Those noble and scholarly Florentines to
Doric origin: and according to Doric usage it means event, story, both words in a hieratic
sense. The most ancient drama represented the legend of a place, or the holy story on which
the foundation of a cult rested ( in other words, not something that is done, but something
that happens: drm in Doric doesnt mean to do) (9; KSA 6, 32; cf. KSA 13, 145[34], 235).
A better understanding of the thinking and implications behind Nietzsches equation of the
Dorian and the Locrian remains a desideratum for further research, beyond the scope of this
translation.
15

See Voltaires poem of 1751, addressed to Angelo Maria Quirini (1860-1755), an Italian
cardinal and a member of the Academies of Science of Berlin, Vienna, and Russia. See
Voltaire, Eptre 81, Monsieur le Cardinal Quirini, in uvres compltes de Voltaire, ed.
Louis Moland, 52 vols (Paris: Garnier, 1877-1885), vol. 10, pp. 357-58.
16

Of the various periods of ancient Greek comedy, New Comedy, following the periods of Old
Comedy and Middle Comedy, is associated with the writings of Menander, and Latin
adaptations by Plautus and Terence.
This constitutes Nietzsches first use of the term genealogisch; in his later works, he will
argue that the meaning of an object can be revealed by tracing its origin, which is uncovered
by genealogy.
17

Aeschylus (c. 525 to c.455-456 BCE) was considered by many (including A.W. Schlegel, in
his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, lecture 6) to be as the creator of tragedy, and
Sophocles (c. 497-496 to 406-405 BCE) as one of its greatest exponents, For a recent
discussion of the significance of tragedy in general, see Charles Freeman, The Greek
Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World (New York: Viking, 1999).
18

whom opera owes its origin at the beginning of the seventeenth century had the
clearly articulated intention of renewing precisely those musical effects which music,
according to numerous eloquent testimonies, had had in antiquity. It is quite
remarkable! The first thought concerning opera already involved a striving for effect.
Through such experiments the roots of an unconscious art nourished by the life of the
people were cut off or at least severely mutilated. Thus, in France popular drama was
displaced by so-called classical tragedy, in other words a genre that had arisen in a
purely scholarly way and supposedly contained the quintessence of tragedy, without
any admixture. In Germany, too, the natural root of drama, the Shrovetide play, has
been undermined since the Reformation; ever since, the new creation of national form
has hardly ever been tried, instead the models of foreign nations govern our thinking
and writing. [171] The real obstacle to the development of modern art-forms is
erudition, conscious knowledge and an excess of knowledge: all growth and
development in the realm of art has to take place in deepest night. The history of
music teaches us that the healthy progressive development of Greek music in the early
Middle Ages was suddenly blocked and hindered in an extreme way when one used
scholarship in theory and practice to return to the age of antiquity. The result was an
unbelievable impoverishment of taste: [].19 This was literary music, music to be
read. What seems to us like an obvious absurdity may well have immediately
appeared as such only to a few in the field I wish to discuss. I maintain that such wellknown writers as Aeschylus and Sophocles are known to us only as librettists, as
writers of lyrics; in other words, that we do not know them at all. While in the sphere
of music we have long gone beyond the scholarly shadow-play of music to be read, in
the sphere of poetry the unnaturalness of writing accompanying texts is itself so
dominant that it requires considerable effort to tell oneself just how unfair we must be
to Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, which is the reason why we do not really know
them. If we call them poets, we mean writers of lyrics: but for precisely that reason
we lose the insight into their being that we can only have if we present the opera to
our minds eye in a moment of imaginative power and in such an idealized way that
The Musarion and the Grooktavausgabe editions omit the following passage, which can be
found in the KGW and KSA: In the incessant contradictions between what had supposedly
been handed down and ones natural sense of pitch one ended up no longer writing music for
the ears, but for the eyes. The eyes were supposed to admire the contrapuntal dexterity of the
composer. How was this to be brought about? The notes were coloured with the colour of
things that were mentioned in the text; hence green, when plants, fields, vineyards, or
crimson, when the sun and the light were mentioned (KSA 1, 517).
19

we are granted an intuition into the music drama of antiquity. For, however distorted
all its relations to so-called grand opera are, and however much it is a product of
distraction, rather than composure, the slave of the poorest rhyming and unworthy
music: however much everything connected with it is lies and shamelessness:
nevertheless, there is no other means of understanding Sophocles than [172] to try to
discern the original image in this caricature, excluding from thought in moments of
enthusiasm all its distortions and deformations. That fantasy image then has to be
carefully examined and, in its individual parts, held up against the tradition of
antiquity, so that we do not over-Hellenize the Hellenics and invent a work of art that
has never existed anywhere in the world. This is no small danger. After all, until
recently it was considered to be an unconditional axiom of art that all idealistic
sculpture had to be uncoloured, and that sculpture in antiquity did not permit the use
of colour. Quite slowly, and encountering the resistance of all those ultra-Hellenists, it
has gradually become possible to accept the polychrome view of ancient sculpture,
according to which we should no longer imagine that statues were naked, but clothed
in a colourful coating. Similarly, general approval is now given to the aesthetic
principle that a union of two or more art forms cannot produce an intensification of
aesthetic pleasure, but is rather a barbaric error of taste. But this principle proves
above all the bad modern way we have become accustomed to, the idea that we can
no longer enjoy as complete human beings: we are, as it were, torn into little pieces by
absolute art-forms, and hence enjoy as little pieces in one moment as human
beings who listen, in another as human beings who see, and so on. Let us contrast this
view with what the brilliant Anselm Feuerbach has to say about the drama of antiquity
as a total work of art:20
It is not surprising, he says, that a profound elective affinity allows the
individual art forms to blend together again into an inseparable whole,
into a new art-form. The Olympic Games brought the separate Greek
tribes together into a political and religious unity: the dramatic festival is
like a festive reunification of the Greek art-forms. [173] The model for
this already existed in those temple festivals where the plastic appearance
of the god was celebrated in front of a devout audience by means of dance
and song. As there, so here architecture constituted the framework and the
Anselm Feuerbach (1829-1880) was a German classicist painter, the son of the
archaeologist and philologist Joseph Anselm Feuerbach (1798-1851) and the grandson of Paul
Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach (1775-1833), among whose other sons was the
philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872).
20

foundation, by means of which the higher poetic sphere is visibly

separated from reality. We see the painter at work on the backdrop and all
the charm of a bright display of colour in the magnificence of the
costumes. The art of poetry has taken over the soul of the whole; but it has
done so, not as a single poetic form, as in the worship of the temple, for
instance, as a hymn. The reports of the Angelos and the Exangelos,[21] so
important for the Greek drama, or of the actors themselves, lead us back
to the epic. Lyric poetry has its place in the scenes of passion and in the
chorus, in all its various degrees from the unmediated outbreak of feeling
in exclamations, from the most delicate blossoming of song up to the
hymn and the dithyramb. In recitation and song, in the playing of the flute
and in the rhythmic steps of the dance, the circle is not entirely closed. For
if poetry is the innermost basic element of the drama, it is in its new form
that it meets together with sculpture.22
Thus Feuerbach. What is certain is that, when confronted with such a work of art, we
have first of all to learn how one enjoys as a complete human being: while it is to be
feared that, confronted with such a work, one would take it to pieces, in order to be
able to get it.23 I even believe that if one of us were to be suddenly transported back to
an Athenian festival performance, he would have the impression of being at an
entirely strange and barbaric spectacle. This would be the case for many different
reasons. In the bright light of the daytime sun, without the mysterious effects of
evening and the stage lighting, in dazzling reality he would see an enormous open
space [174] full to bursting with people: everyones gaze would be directed towards a
crowd of men below, wearing masks and moving in a wondrous way, and a few
superhumanly sized puppets, marching up and down a long, thin stage in slow, regular
steps. For what else, other than puppets, would we call those beings, standing on high
heels or on cothurni, with giant-sized, gaudily painted masks in front of their faces
The figure of the messenger (angelos or exangelos) is exemplified in Oedipus the King by
the first messenger, who announces the choice of Oedipus as their king by the people of
Isthmus, and the second messenger, who narrates the death of Jocasta. For further discussion,
see James Barrett, Staged Narrative: Poetics and the Messenger in Greek Tragedy (Berkeley,
LA, and London: University of California Press, 2002).
21

Anselm Feuerbach, Der vatikanische Apollo: Eine Reihe archologisch-sthetischer

Betrachtungen [1833], 2nd edn (Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1855), pp. 282-83; translated
by PB According to Giorgio Collis and Mazzino Montinaris commentary, Nietzsche
borrowed this book from the University Library in Basel on 26 November 1869 (KSA 14, 99).
22

23

Here Nietzsche uses the verb aneignen, in much the same way that Goethe, in Faust I, writes:
What we are born with, we must make our own / Or it remains a mere appurtenance / And is
not ours (Was du ererbt von deinen Vtern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen) (ll. 684-85;
Goethe, Faust: Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
1987), p. 25). These lines were one of Freuds favorite quotations from Goethe.

and covering their heads, their chests and bodies, arms and legs padded out and filled
with stuffing in an entirely unnatural way, hardly able to move, weighed down by the
burden of a trailing cloak and massive headgear? At the same time, these figures have
to speak and to sing through the wide open mouth-holes as loudly as possible, in order
to be understood by an audience of more than 20,000 people: to be sure, an heroic
task, worthy of a marathon fighter. Our wonder will become even greater, however,
when we realize that an individual actor-singer has to recite across a ten-hour period
some 1600 verses, among them at least six larger and smaller sung set-pieces. And all
this in front of a public that unforgivingly punished every slip of pitch, every incorrect
emphasis or did in Athens where, as Lessing put it, even the rabble had a fine and
delicate sense of judgement.24 What concentration and exercise of human forces, what
protracted preparation, what seriousness and enthusiasm in the sense of the artistic
task we have to presume here, in short: what an ideal concept of the actor! Here tasks
were set for the most noble citizens; here a marathon fighter, even in the event of a
mistake, suffered no loss of dignity; here the actor, just he as in his costume
represented an elevation above the day-to-day level of human beings, experienced an
internal sense of uplift, [175] in which the pathos-laden, immensely powerful words
of Aeschylus must have seemed like a natural language.
With the same solemnity as the actor the spectator listens: over him, too, is
spread an unusual, much-longed-for festive mood. It is not the anxious flight from
boredom, the will to be rid of ones self and ones misery for a few hours at any cost,
that has driven these men into the theatre. The ancient Greek took refuge from the
familiar distractions of public life, from life in the market-place, the street, and the
courts of justice, in the calm and meditation-promoting festivities of theatrical action:
not like the German of old, who desired entertainment as soon as he had cut through
the circle of his interior existence, and found an amusing source of diversion in the
cut-and-thrust of the law-courts, which came to determine the form and atmosphere of
his drama. By contrast, the soul of the Athenian who came to watch the tragedy at the
great Dionysian festivals still bore within him something of that element from which
tragedy had sprung. That is, the powerful drive of springtime when it bursts forth, a
24

Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, vol. 1, No. 2: There was only one Athens, and there
will only ever be one Athens, where even in the masses the ethical feeling was so fine, so
delicate, that actors and authors of a dubious morality ran the risk of being hounded from the
theater! (Lessing, Werke in fnf Bnden, ed. Karl Balser, 5 vols (Berlin and Weimar: AufbauVerlag, 1982), vol. 4, p. 19); translated by PB.

10

storming and raging in a mixture of emotions that is familiar to all nave peoples and
the whole of nature when spring approaches. As is well known, our carnival plays and
masquerades were originally just such spring festivals, which have only become
unfashionable because of pressure from the Church. Here everything draws on deep
instincts: those immense Dionysian processions in ancient Greece find their
counterpart in the dancers of St. John and St. Vitus in the Middle Ages, when a crowd,
growing ever larger in number, sang and danced its way from town to town.25 Even if
today the medical establishment speaks of this phenomenon as a national epidemic of
the Middle Ages, we should remember that the ancient drama blossomed forth from
precisely such a national epidemic, [176] and that it is the misfortune that the arts
today do not flow from such a mysterious source. Not from wilfulness and deliberate
exuberance in the first beginnings of the drama did wildly-moving crowds, dressed as
satyrs and sileni, their faces smeared with soot, vermilion and other plant-based
pigments, their heads adorned with floral wreaths, roam through field and wood: the
all-powerful, so suddenly announced effect of spring here intensifies the powers of
life into such an excess that ecstatic conditions, visions, and the belief in ones own
enchanted state appear everywhere, and similarly affected individuals stream in
hordes across the countryside. Here is the cradle of the drama. For the drama does not
begin when someone disguises himself and seeks to deceive other people: no, rather it
begins when a human being steps outside himself and believes himself to be
transformed and enchanted. In this condition of being-outside-of-oneself, or ecstasy,
only one further step is necessary: we do not return back into ourselves, but turn into
another being, so that we ourselves behave like enchanted beings. This is the
fundamental reason for our deep astonishment at the sight of the drama: the ground
(that is, the belief in the indissolubility and permanence of the individual) sways
beneath our feet. And just as the Dionysian reveller believes in his transformation, in
this respect the exact opposite to Bottom in A Midsummer Nights Dream,26 so the
Compare with The Birth of Tragedy, 1: In the German Middle Ages, too, singing and
dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, whirled themselves from place to place under this
same Dionysian impulse. In these dancers of St. John and St. Vitus, we rediscover the Bacchic
choruses of the Greeks, with their prehistory in Asia Minor, as far back as Babylon and the
orgiastic Sacaea (Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and tr. Walter Kaufmann, New York:
Modern Library, 1968, p. 36) (KSA 1, 29); cf. KSA 7, 1[1], 10; 1[33]-[34], 19; 7[50], 150;
Human, All-Too-Human, vol. 1, 214 (KSA 2, 174); cf. KSA 8, 23[11], 406.
25

In the German translation of Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream, set in Athens and
a nearby wood, the figure of Bottom is called Zettel, the name used here by Nietzsche. The
commentary in KGW, III.5/2, p. 1469, draws attention to the following passage in Richard
26

11

dramatic poet believes in the reality of his characters.27 Whoever does not share this
belief can neither belong to the thyrsus-bearers, the dilettantes, nor for that matter to
the true followers of Dionysos, the Bacchantes.28
Something of this Dionysian life of nature could still be found in the soul of
the spectators in the heyday of the Attic drama. It was no tired, lazy audience with a
subscription ticket to every performance, arriving with weary and exhausted
overstimulated senses [177] in the theater in order to find emotional stimulation. In
contrast to this audience, which is the straitjacket of our modern theater, the Athenian
spectator still had the fresh senses of early morning, albeit now in a festive mood,
when he sat down on the steps of the auditorium. What was simple was, for him, not
yet too simple: his aesthetic erudition consisted in the memories of previous happy
days in the theater; his confidence in the dramatic genius of his people knew no limits.
Most important, however, was that he drank the potion of tragedy so rarely that, every
time he did, he enjoyed it as he had the first time. It is in this sense that I wish to cite
the words of the most important living architect who has passed his judgement on
ceiling paintings and painted domes: Nothing is more advantageous, he says, for
the work of art than when it is beyond any immediate and vulgar contact with what is
close at hand or seen from the usual perspective of human beings. Through becoming
accustomed to seeing things easily, the optic nerve becomes so stunted, that it can
only recognize the stimulus and the relations between colours and forms as if behind a
Wagers essay on Beethoven, also published in 1870: Whoever allows himself to be
influenced by the views I have here expressed in regard of Beethovenian music, will certainly
not escape being called fantastic and extravagant; and this reproach will be levelled at him not
merely by our educated and uneducated musicians of the day who for the most part have
seen that dream-vision of Musics under no other guise than Bottoms dream in the
Midsummers-Night but in particular by our literary poets and even our plastic artists, so
far as they ever trouble their heads with questions that seem to lie entirely beyond their
sphere (Richard Wagner, Actors and Singers, tr. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NB and
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 57-126 [p. 113]; cf. Smtliche Schriften
und Dichtungen [Volks-Ausgabe], 16 in 8 vols (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hrtel/Siegel, 1911),
vol. 9, pp. 61-126 [p. 112]).
Compare with Nietzsches remarks on the lyric poet in The Birth of Tragedy, 5: The lyric
genius is conscious of a world of images and symbols growing out of his state of mystical
self-abnegation and oneness. [] The images of the lyrist are nothing but his very self and, as
it were, only different projections of himself [] (Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 50) (KSA
1, 44-45).
27

In their commentary (KSA 14, 99), Colli and Montinari suggest an allusion to the Phaedo,
69 c (where Socrates says: You know how the initiation practitioners say, Many bear the
emblems, but the devotees are few?; Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. 52).
28

12

veil.29 Beyond a doubt something analogous can be claimed about enjoying a drama
only rarely: it is to the advantage of pictures and plays when they are seen from an
unusual angle and sensed differently, without going so far as to recommend the
ancient Roman practice of standing in the theater.
Thus far we have only considered the actor and the spectator. Let us think,
thirdly, of the poet: and here I am using the word in its widest sense, as the Greeks
understood it. It is true that the Greek tragedians have exercised their immeasurable
influence on more recent art only as librettists: [178] but if that is true, nevertheless I
am convinced that a complete, authentic presentation of an Aeschylean trilogy, with
Attic actors, audience, and poets, would have on us a shattering effect, because it
would reveal to us the artistic human being in such perfection and harmony that in
comparison our own great writers would appear like statues that had been begun well
but were never completed.
In Greek antiquity, the dramatist was confronted with a task that was made as
difficult as possible: the freedom to choose material, the number of actors, and
innumerable other things that our dramatists enjoy, would have struck an Attic critic
as a lack of discipline. Throughout the whole of Greek art one finds the proud law that
only what is most difficult is a fit task for the free man. And so the authority and
reputation of a sculptural work of art depended greatly on the difficulty of its
working, or on the hardness of the material used. Among the particular difficulties,
thanks to which the path to dramatic fame has never been a wide one, are the limited
number of actors, the use of the chorus, the circumscribed range of mythical
reference, but, above all, that virtue of the pentathlon athlete the need to be
creatively gifted as a writer and a musician, as a conductor and a director, and finally
as an actor. For our dramatists, their life-boat is the novelty, and thus the interest, of
their material which they have chosen for their play. They think in the same way as
Italian improvisation artists do: they narrate a new story to its climax and to the
highest point of excitement, and then are convinced that no-one will leave before the
end. To keep hold of ones audience right to the end by stimulating interest was, to the
Greek tragedians, [179] something unheard-of: the subject-matter of their
masterpieces was already well-known and, in epic and lyric form alike, deeply
See Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Knsten, oder,
Praktische Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch fr Techniker, Knstler und Kunstfreunde, 2 vols
(Frankfurt am Main: Verlag fr Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1860-1863), vol. 1, Die textile Kunst
fr sich betrachtet und in Beziehung zur Baukunst, p. 75; translated by PB.
29

13

familiar to each audience member from his childhood. It was already an heroic deed
to awaken real ruth for an Orestes, for an Oedipus: but how limited, how obstinately
restricted were the means that could be used to arouse this compassion! In this
respect, the only thing that matters is the chorus, which for ancient playwrights was as
important as the noble characters, seated on either side of the stage in a way that
transformed it into a royal antechamber, were for the French tragedians. Just as, for
the sake of this curious, non-participatory and nevertheless participatory chorus, the
French tragedian was not allowed to change the scenery, and just as language and
gesture on the stage modelled themselves accordingly: so the ancient chorus
demanded that the entire action in each drama take place in public, so that the open
square was the place of action for the tragedy. This is an audacious demand: for the
tragic deed and the events leading up to it tend not to take place on the open street, but
rather to grow in secret. Everything made public, everything in daylight, everything in
the presence of the chorus this was the cruel demand. Not that, out of any kind of
aesthetic fastidiousness, this was anywhere declared to be a demand: rather, in the
long process of its development this stage of the drama had been reached, and had
been preserved through the instinct that here, for the veritable genius, was a worthy
task to be performed. It is well known that, originally, the tragedy was nothing other
than a giant choral-song: this historical insight, however, provides the key to that
other wondrous problem. The main effect and the overall impact of ancient tragedy at
its height could [180] still be found in the chorus: it was the chief factor with which
one had to contend and which could not be placed to one side. The developmental
stage, maintained by the drama more or less from Aeschylus to Euripides, is the one
where the chorus had been pushed back, but could still provide the general tenor. One
step further and the scenery dominated the orchestra, the colony the founding city;
the dialectic between the stage characters and their individual songs came forward and
overwhelmed the overall choral or musical impression that had hitherto been
dominant. This step was indeed taken, and its contemporary, Aristotle, fixed it
permanently in his famous, and highly confusing, definition that did not apply at all to
the essence of the Aeschylean tragedy.30

See Aristotles definition of tragedy in his Poetics, 6, which includes the following: Every
tragedy has six constituents, which will determine its quality. These are plot, character,
diction, thought, spectacle, and song (Classical Literary Criticism, p. 39).
30

14

So the first thought by the design of a dramatic text must be to conceive a

group of men or women with whom the acting characters are closely related: then,
one must look for opportunities for the lyrical or musical group feelings to find an
expression. To a certain extent the poet looked at the stage characters from the
perspective of the chorus, and so did the Athenian audience: we, who have only the
libretto, look at the chorus from the perspective of the stage. So its significance cannot
be exhausted in an analogy. When Schlegel called it the ideal spectator,31 this only
means that the poet is trying to show in the way the chorus responds to the action how
he would like the spectator to respond. But this is to emphasize just one aspect: above
all it is important that the actor playing the hero uses it as if through a megaphone to
declaim his feelings to the spectator in hugely expanded form. Although a plurality of
persons, musically the chorus [181] does not represent a multiplicity, but an enormous
single being endowed with oversized lungs. This is not the place to point out that an
ethical idea is associated with the unison choral music of the Greeks, which stands in
a huge contrast to the development of Christian music, in which harmony, the true
symbol of multiplicity, dominates for such a long time that the melody became
entirely suppressed and recently had to be rediscovered. It was the chorus that laid
down the limits to how poetic fantasy revealed itself in tragedy: the religious choral
dance with its festive andante restrained the otherwise so high-spirited inventive mind
of the poets, while the English tragedy, knowing no such bounds, behaved itself in its
imaginative realism in a much more impetuous, Dionysian, but basically much more
wistful way, rather like an allegro by Beethoven. To give the chorus a number of great
opportunities for lyrical, emotional declarations this is the most important principle
in the economy of the ancient drama. This is easily achieved, however, in even the
briefest fragment of a saga: hence, the absence of everything that is complicated, of
everything that has to do with intrigue, of everything neatly and artificially combined,
or in short: everything that defines the character of the modern tragic drama. In the
ancient music drama, there was nothing that one would have had to work out: even
See A.W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen ber dramatische Kunst und Literatur, Lecture 5, in
Kritische Schriften und Briefe, ed. Edgar Lohner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1962-1974), vol. 5,
pp. 61-71 (esp. pp. 64-66). See also The Birth of Tragedy, 7: A.W. Schlegel [] advises us
to regard the chorus somehow as the essence and extract of the crowd of spectators as the
ideal spectator. This view, when compared with the historical tradition that originally
tragedy was only chorus, reveals itself for what it is a crude, unscientific, yet brilliant
claim that owes its brilliancy only to its concentrated form of expression, to the typically
Germanic bias in favor of anything called ideal, and to our momentary astonishment (Basic
Writings of Nietzsche, pp. 56-57; KSA 1, 53).
31

15

the cunning of individual heroes in myths has something simple, something honorable
about it. Never, not even in Euripides, is the essence of the drama transformed into a
game of chess: though, it is true, something of the game of chess is the chief
characteristic of the so-called modern comedy. For this reason, the entire dramas of
the ancient writers, in their simple structure, are like one act of our tragedies and
resemble most closely the fifth act that leads in short, quick steps to the catastrophe.
French classical tragedy [182] because it knew its predecessor, the Greek music
drama, only as a libretto, and had difficulties with the introduction of the chorus
had to take an entirely new element into itself, if only in order to fill out the fifth act
as prescribed by Horace:32 this ballast, without which this art-form did not dare to set
sail, was the intrigue, that is, a puzzle for the understanding and a playground for the
small, essentially un-tragic passions: as a result of which its character came
significantly closer to that of the new Attic comedies. Ancient tragedy was, in
comparison, poor in action and tension; one could even say that, in its earlier
developmental stages, it was not interested at all in action, in drama, but in suffering,
in pathos. The plot was only added when the dialogue arose: and every genuine and
serious deed took place off-stage in the heyday of the drama. What was the tragedy
originally other than an objective lyric, a song that was sung from the condition of
certain mythological beings, and moreover in their costume? First of all, a
dithyrambic chorus, composed of men disguised as satyrs and sileni, had to
understand what had put it into such a state of excitement: it pointed, in a way that
was immediately comprehensible to the spectators, to an episode from the story of the
struggles and sufferings of Dionysos. Later, the divinity itself was introduced, for a
dual purpose: for one thing, in order to relate in person his adventures, in which he
was involved and which aroused his followers into animated participation. For
another, during those passionate choral songs Dionysos is, as it were, the living
image, the living statue of the god: indeed, the actor of antiquity had something of the
stone guest in Mozart.33 On this matter a music critic has recently made a pertinent
observation: [183] In the form of the dressed-up actor, he says, we see a normal
human being, but the ancient Greeks saw in the tragic mask someone artificial, or
See Ars poetica, 189 (in Classical Literary Criticism, p. 85): If you want your play to be
called for and given a second performance, it should not be either shorter or longer than five
acts.
32

33

See Mozarts opera Don Giovanni, Act 2.

16

someone stylized into a hero. Our deep-set stages, on which often up to a hundred
people are grouped, turn the performance into colorful paintings, as bright as they can
be. The thin stage of ancient times, with its back-stage wall brought forward, turned
the few figures, moving with measured tread, into living bas-reliefs or animated
marble statues of a temple pediment. If, through a miracle, the marble figures of the
dispute between Athena and Poseidon on the pediment of the Parthenon were to be
brought to life, they would speak in the language of Sophocles.34
Let me return to the point, already made, that in the Greek drama the emphasis
was on suffering, not on action: now it will be easier to understand why I believe that
we are necessarily unfair to Aeschylus and to Sophocles, and that we do not, in fact,
really know them. For we do not possess a yardstick to assess the judgment of an Attic
audience about a literary work, because we do not know (or barely know) how
suffering, or how the emotional life as it erupts, was turned into such a moving
impression. We lack the competence to deal with a Greek tragedy, because its main
effect relies to a large extent on an element that we have lost in the music. To the
place of music in ancient drama one can fully apply the demand expressed by Gluck
in his famous preface to his Alceste.35 The music should support the poetic text,
intensify the expression of feelings and the interest of the dramatic situation, without
interrupting the action or distracting through pointless ornamentation. It should be to
poetry what the brightness of [184] colors and a happy combination of shadow and
light are for a flawless and well-composed drawing, when they only serve to bring the
figures to life without destroying the overall outlines. Music, then, was used purely as
a means to an end: its task was to convert the suffering of the god and the hero into
the strongest possible compassion in the spectators. Now, it is true that language also
has this task, but it is much more difficult for it to achieve it, and it can only do so by
indirect means. Language has an impact primarily on the conceptual world, and only
August Wilhelm Ambros, Geschichte der Musik, 5 vols (Leipzig: Leuckart, 1862-1868),
vol. 1, p. 288; translated by PB. On the west pediment of the Parthenon temple in Athens, the
goddess of wisdom and war, Athena, and the sea-god Poseidon, were depicted in competition
for the patronage of the city. For further discussion of this image, see Ernest Arthur Gardner,
Athene in the West Pediment of the Parthenon, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 3 (1882):
244-255.
34

35

The preface to the published version (1769) of the opera Alceste (first performed 1767),
based on the tragedy Alceste by Euripides, sets out the principles for the reform of opera
elaborated by Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787); notably, a greater prominence should
be given to the chorus.

17

secondarily on the emotions, and frequently it does not, because of the length of the
path, reach its goal at all. Music, on the other hand, immediately touches the heart, as
the true universal language that is understood everywhere by everyone.
Admittedly, one still finds views expressed about Greek music, as if it were
the very opposite of such a universally comprehensible language, but rather
represented a completely alien world of sound, invented in a scholarly way and
composed from doctrines about acoustics. Every now and then people still think, for
example, about the superstition that in Greek music the major third was considered a
discord. One has to free oneself entirely from such ideas and always remember that
the music of the Greeks is much closer to our feeling than the music of the Middle
Ages. What has survived of ancient compositions is reminiscent in its strict rhythmic
structure of our folk-songs: but it is from the folk-song that the entire poetic art and
music of antiquity blossomed. True, there is music that is purely instrumental, but it is
only an opportunity to display virtuosity. The true Greek always felt such music to be
something foreign, imported from Asiatic lands overseas. Real Greek music is
undoubtedly [185] vocal music: the natural link between the language of words and
the language of sounds has not yet been torn apart: and this is true to the extent that
the poet was necessarily also the composer of his song. The Greeks learned a song
through no other means than singing it: for they sensed, when listening, the innermost
unity of word and sound. But we, who have grown up under the influence of the bad
habits of modern art and of its separation of the art-forms, are hardly any longer in a
position to enjoy words and music together. For we have got used to enjoying each
separately, literature only when reading it which is why we do not trust our own
judgement when a poem is read or a play is acted out, and demand to see the text
and music when listening to it. We also find the most absurd text to be bearable, as
long as the music is beautiful: something that would seem to a Greek to be truly
barbaric.
Apart from the sisterly relation as just emphasized between poetry and music,
two further things are characteristic of ancient music: its simplicity, or poverty even,
of harmony, and its richness in rhythmic means of expression. I have already
indicated that the choral song differed from the solo song only in the number of
voices, and that the accompanying instruments were permitted only a very limited
plurality of voices, or harmony in our sense. The very first demand was that one
understood the content of the song as it was recited: and if one could really
18

understand a Pindaric or an Aeschylean chorus-song, with its audacious metaphors

and its way of leaping from one idea to another, then this implies a remarkable art of
recitation and, at the same time, an extremely idiosyncratic musical accentuation and
rhythm. To the musical and rhythmic periodic structure, which moved in strict parallel
to the text, there corresponded on the other hand, as an external means of expression,
the movement of dance [186] on one side, the ritual dance. In the evolutions of the
choral dances, which led back in front of the eyes of the spectators like arabesques on
the broad surfaces of the orchestra, one perceived that music had, in a sense, become
visible.36 While the music intensified the effect of the lyrics, the ritual dance explained
the music. Thus the task emerged for the poet and the composer alike to become a
creative master of ballet.
At this point one should say a further word about the limitations of music in
the drama. The deeper significance of these limitations as the Achilles heel of the
ancient music drama, inasmuch as it is here that its process of decline begins, is not
going to be discussed today, because I intend to discuss this very point in my next
lecture.37 For now, this fact should suffice: not everything that had been written could
be sung, and sometimes, as in our melodramas, a text was spoken to the
accompaniment of instrumental music. But we should always think of that kind of
speaking as delivered in a quasi-recitative style, so that the booming tone peculiar to it
did not introduce a dualism into the music drama, but rather, even in language, the
dominating influence of music had become powerful. A kind of echo of this recitative
style can be heard in the so-called reading tone, used in the Catholic Church to
recite the Gospels, the Epistles, and some prayers. The priest who is reading makes
certain inflexions of his voice to indicate the punctuation and the conclusion of
sentences, which assures the clarity of the recitation and at the same time avoids
monotony. But at important moments of the sacred action the voice of the priest is
raised: the pater noster, the Preface, the blessing turn into a declamatory chant.38
Compare with Schopenhauers idea in The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, 52,
that, in music, the will-to-life itself becomes in some sense visible: Music is as immediate an
objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is [] Therefore music is by no
means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself
(Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne, 2 vols (New York:
Dover, 1969), vol. 1, p. 257.
36

37

See Socrates and Tragedy, KSA 1, 533-49.

38

Ambros, Geschichte der Musik, vol. 1, p. 290.

19

Indeed, the ritual of the High Mass [187] recalls much of the Greek music drama,
with the exception that, in Greece, everything was much brighter, more sunlit,
altogether more beautiful, but correspondingly less introverted and lacking the
mysterious, unending symbolism of the Christian Church.
At this point, dear listeners, I have reached my conclusion. Earlier I compared
the creator of the ancient music drama with the athlete of the pentathlon, or the
pentathlete: another image will make more accessible to us the significance of such a
musical-dramatic pentathlete for the entire art of antiquity. In the history of ancient
costume Aeschylus has an extraordinary significance, inasmuch as he introduced the
free arrangement of the folds, the delicateness, magnificence and grace of the main
robe, while previously the Greeks looked like barbarians in their costumes and had
not discovered freely falling folds. In relation to the entire art of antiquity the Greek
music drama is like that free arrangement of the folds: in it, everything unfree,
everything isolated in the individual art forms is overcome; at their communal
sacrificial festivals hymns are sung to beauty and at the same time to audacity. Tightly
bound, yet possessing grace; a multiplicity, yet a unity; many arts working at their
highest level, yet one single work of art that is the ancient music drama. Whoever
looks at it and is reminded of the ideal espoused by a certain contemporary reformer
of art will, at the same time, say to himself that this art-work of the future39 is by no
means a gleaming, yet deceptive, mirage: what we hope for the future is something
that was once reality in a past that belongs two thousand years ago.

An obvious reference to Richard Wagner and his treatise, The Artwork of the Future (Das
Kunstwerk der Zukunft) (1849). According to the entry in Cosima Wagners diary for 11 June
1870, Nietzsche read his lecture to Wagner and Rohde during a visit to Triebschen, but
Wagner disapproved of the title (see Dieter Borchmeyer and Jrg Salaquarda (eds), Nietzsche
und Wagner: Stationen einer epochalen Begegnung, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1994),
vol. 2, p. 1158); for the possible cause of Wagners discontent, see Cosimas response in her
letter to Nietzsche of 24 June 1870, cited above (Nietzsche und Wagner, vol. 1, pp. 89-90).
39

20